


Pythia

by YdrittE



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Body Swap, Gen, Mind Control, Puppet!Sephiroth, Sharing a Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 18:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12893907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YdrittE/pseuds/YdrittE
Summary: She has known ever since the beginning that it was not going to last.





	Pythia

**Author's Note:**

> I took what could have been an amusing, charming little escapade about Jenova and Sephiroth swapping bodies, and turned it into a traumatizing horror scenario with half an existential crisis thrown in there for good measure. Why is my brain like this.

She has known ever since the beginning that it was not going to last. She sees the admiration in the eyes of the scientists, trying to figure out what she is, how she came to be, and she wants to tell them that they needn’t bother. This body is temporary. It has broken and mended itself a thousand times over, and she will have to discard it sooner or later. It was never meant to be more than a vessel.

And yet… there are no host bodies for her to inhabit. They have disappeared, gone extinct in the two thousand years since she was last awake and aware. The Ancients are gone, taking with them the carefully constructed plans she had made. There are remnants of their civilization still alive, but they’re not enough. She needs _more_. She needs a line of creatures strong enough to take over, resilient enough to carry out her will. Humans are too weak; they won’t do. She _needs_ … she doesn’t know what she needs.

Not until she enters the mind of one Doctor Lucrecia Crescent, and for the first time comes into contact not only with a human mind, but with the ideas inside it. Ideas of reviving the Cetra, of taking her cells and shaping a new human out of them. _How?_ she wonders, and fails to see the answer, until Lucrecia Crescent’s thoughts at some point start wandering towards the little bundle of cells nestled inside her womb. It’s _growing_. And Jenova understands.

 _Your human reproduction is quite strange_ she muses, and feels the wave of fear rushing through Lucrecia at hearing the voice. _Yes, I am here. I am still here, after all this time. And you will help me come back._

Lucrecia does not tell her partner about the voice that speaks to her inside her head. She doesn’t mention the plans the entity shares with her, of the rotting body behind glass and how to escape it. She fears for her child, but then again, it had been clear from the beginning that she would have to make sacrifices to bring back the powers of the Ancients. It will be worth it in the end, she tries to tell herself, cradling the little bump that has begun to form where her child is growing. It will be worth it. It has to be.

 

Jenova is quite annoyed when Lucrecia suddenly disappears from the project after the child is born, running away to escape the consequences of what they’ve accomplished together. Eight months of teaching her how to raise her offspring, how to turn it into the ideal vessel for her to inhabit later down the line, and now all that knowledge is lost and she has to start over.

The annoyance does not last long. Hojo proves to be quite the ample student, and Jenova realizes quickly that her plans line up almost perfectly with the budding Soldier Project – the child will be trained to be a warrior, to be strong and fast and dangerous. He will be enhanced with her cells and Mako to push his body beyond the limits of what is normally possible for these laughably weak humans. He will be _perfect_ , Hojo tells her, his eyes bright with something dangerous and ambitious and utterly devoid of remorse. Jenova makes the rotting body smile at him through the glass, and purrs her satisfaction.

_He will be perfect. And he will be m i n e._

 

It takes twenty years.

Hojo’s eyes are no longer as bright, and Jenova can feel the remorse buried deep inside. But the ambition is still there, and Hojo will not fail like his wife did. He will not let his own mind get in the way of perfection. And Sephiroth _will_ be perfect. Needles and tubes and scalpels and more cruelty than necessary will make it so.

Jenova slips into the mind of her vessel, quietly and unobstrusively, to watch and feel and get to know the body. He moves gracefully, so much in control of himself. He has been trained well. He will do.

And he is _almost_ ready.

One more round of injections, one last boost to finally push the number of J-cells, as Hojo likes to call them, in Sephiroth’s body over fifty percent.

And then it will be time.

 

Sephiroth breathes a sigh of relief when the door to his apartment finally falls shut behind him. That’s it. Done. The day is over. He rolls his shoulders to try and work the tension out of them, staggering straight towards the bedroom and only stopping to put Masamune on the weapon rack. Even if he’s on the brink of passing out from exhaustion, the sword needs to be in its place. Wouldn’t do to step on it when he wakes up later and has to find his way into the kitchen barefoot and in the dark.

Fortunately he left the shutters closed when he went away this morning. His eyes are still sensitive to even the smallest bit of light. All those tests and injections must’ve taken a toll on them. He doesn’t even have the energy to shrug out of his coat before letting himself fall on the bed and pulling the covers over his head, curling up beneath them into a ball of muffled comforting warmth. He decides to call in sick tomorrow. They’ll manage one fucking day without him babysitting them. And if they don’t then it won’t be his problem.

 

He wakes up to floating silence, liquid holding his body suspended and numbing his senses. He tries to lift his head, but it feels strangely heavy.

Has it all been a dream? Is he still in the mako tank in the labs?

He sincerely hopes that’s not the case.

Experimentally he tries to stretch his limbs, raise his arms and work the tension out of his muscles. His body feels like it’s a few steps behind his mind, moving sluggishly and to some extent not reacting at all. He squirms uncomfortably and realizes he can’t feel his extremeties, his fingers and toes and… other parts. What have they done to him during this lab session? He finally manages with great difficulty to raise his head and open his eyes… or rather, his eye. The right one shows him nothing but darkness, while the left one blinks rapidly and slowly focuses beyond the mako he is suspended in, on an unfamiliar room that appears to be made entirely of steel plates and tubes. This doesn’t look like the labs. Where the hell is he?

His single working eye catches sight of the reflection in the specimen tank’s glass. A shudder runs through his mind. He suddenly feels very cold.

What… _is_ that?

It’s not him.

It has silver hair, swirling around its face just like his does when suspended underwater, but that’s where the similarities end.

It’s not him.

It stares at him with its single working eye, wide open in shock and glowing a pale pink in the dim light of whatever this facility is. The rest of the body has started shaking visibly, muscles that had been held in stasis for hundreds and thousands of years now suddenly being forced into action again.

It’s not him.

It can’t be him.

With great effort one malformed arm tears away from the grotesque wing mutations that he can feel protruding from his back, leaving tendrils of flesh that ooze some sort of black pus hanging from it, moving softly in the mako, as he reaches out to touch the glass. The figure in the reflection mirrors his gesture.

It’s him.

The nerves in his fingertips burn when they make contact with the glass. The pain spreads slowly but surely through his entire nervous system, finally waking up the body for good. The outstretched hand balls into a fist.

Some part of his brain is screeching in panic and urging him to scratch his eyes out and tear himself to pieces, but he refuses to let it take over. He _needs_ to keep on top of the situation. He wasn’t raised to lose his head at the first sign of trouble. Whether this is one of Hojo’s inhuman experiments to test his resolve, an accident, or something entirely different, he cannot give in. He will get out of this tank, he will get out of this facility, and he will get back to Midgar. And then he will demand an explanation, and a solution to whatever this situation is.

His arm draws back, leaving trails of thick black fluid, and then strikes forward. The glass shatters around him, slicing into his decaying flesh as he struggles and fails to keep himself upright without the mako to support him, and for the first time in over two thousand years Jenova’s body fills its lungs with air.

 

What is that? Kill it! Screams from the crowd; horrified, disgusted faces. Colours blending together. He can’t concentrate.

His mind singles out Hojo’s shocked and deadly pale face from the chaos surrounding him, and he feels himself reaching out, breaths rasping in his throat. Help me, he wants to say, help me fix this. The Professor takes a cautious step back, his eyes flickering to the armed guards surrounding his specimen, guns at the ready.  

“Don’t worry; I will take care of it” says a voice he knows, from television and radio and from whenever he opens his mouth, and the figure steps forward with silver hair trailing softly behind them, Masamune in hand and fire magic forming in the other, and a smirk, he can see it, he can see it so clearly, and eyes so very bright. He doesn’t remember ever having bright eyes like that.

This is where he has to scream, yell, point his finger at the impostor, the thief, and get those clueless bystanders to help him drive out whatever mind lurks behind the eyes that stare at him. He needs to say it, and make them believe it.

He opens his mouth, and not a sound comes out. He doesn’t know what to say, or how to say it. He doesn’t have words to describe what is going on, what it feels and looks and sounds like. His mind is blank as he stares at his own body, the body that is his. Or was. It’s not anymore.

They raise Masamune, preparing to attack; he recognizes the movement; he knows what it feels like; he knows exactly how much energy to use to move like this. So do they, it seems. Where did they learn, he wonders.

“I don’t know what you are” they say in his smooth, calm voice, barely more than a whisper “I don’t know why you carry the name of my Mother. But you have no place here. Leave, or I will make you regret it”

But their eyes don’t say the same thing. The eyes are cold and calculating, and yet at the same time surprised, and tell him ‘You shouldn’t be here. Why are you here?’. They follow him warily, as if expecting him to attack at any moment, as if _he’s_ the one in armor with a sword and materia at his disposal. As if he is dangerous. Who knows, maybe he is? Maybe this body _is_ dangerous when inhabited by someone who knows how to unlock its potential. But he doesn’t know anything. He only knows about the body he’s no longer in.

And he sees the telltale signs, the muscles tensing ever so subtly, the grip on Masamune tightening just the slightest bit. He knows the attack is coming without needing to see it. If he was himself it wouldn’t even come close to hitting him.

 

Her eyes dart around the blank white room they’ve put her in, impatiently, restlessly. Her fingers drum a steady rhythm on the table. It makes the assistant nervous. She can practically smell the sweat from across the room. _Humans are such laughably weak creatures._ Who do they think they are, to put her here and then not even acknowledge her presence, as if she is unimportant? To force her into the labs under the pretense of a ‘mental checkup’, and then ignore her?

She supposes in a way they’re right. The body must be taken care of, removed from where others can see it, to dissect and take apart and maybe try to bring back to life. This might just be the biggest catastrophe Hojo has ever faced. He’s lost the single most important specimen that has ever been under his care. Or, well, that’s what he believes.

_Who would have thought this body that has survived two thousand years of being exposed to binding spells and cold and disease and who knows what would break so easily once my mind was no longer there to keep it going?_

She’s not supposed to think about it. She has to go on with her – Sephiroth’s – life and not look back. _If I look back I am lost._ And yet…

The look on this face that used to be hers, that look of absolute betrayal. The little sigh of air leaving these lungs. The body doesn’t have blood, not in the way humans define it, but it bleeds nonetheless. It bleeds emotions and memories and thoughts and hopes and broken dreams all over her consciousness. If the body is gone, where does the mind flee to?

_To its mother._

She should’ve known.

 _Who are you?_ asks the little spirit inside her head, but she pushes it away. She doesn’t have time for it right now. She needs to concentrate, pretend, play her role so they will let her go and give her enough space to think about what to do next. How to soothe her terrified dead child. _He is my child, and always has been. No matter who gave birth to him or who raised him; they did it in my stead so that one day he would be mine. And now he is, and I don’t know what to do with him._

She sighs wearily, causing the lab assistant tasked with watching her until Hojo arrives to look up in worry. She ignores the man, and tries to mentally prepare for the questions they will inevitably ask, and the lies they will come up with to explain to Sephiroth what this creature with his supposed dead mother’s name engraved in its helmet was, where it came from, why he had to kill it. She hopes the explanation will be believeable, or else she might have to kill them all just to stay in character. _And wouldn’t that just be a bother._

The door opens with a hiss.


End file.
